Louis Gluckstein

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Sir Louis Halle Gluckstein (born February 23, 1897 in Hamstead , † October 27, 1979 ) was a British lawyer and politician ( Conservative Party ).

Life and activity

Gluckstein was a son of Joseph Gluckstein, a brother of the founders of the J. Lyons and Co. coffee house chain, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein, and his wife Francesca, nee. Halle, an American opera singer. The painter Hannah Gluckstein was his older sister.

After attending St. Paul's School and Lincoln College in Oxford , Gluckstein joined the Suffolk Regiment, with which he took part in the First World War . It was also used in World War II . Overall, he was a member of the army until 1948.

On the occasion of the general election in 1931, Gluckstein was elected as a candidate for the Conservative Party for the constituency of Nottingham East as a member of the British Parliament. He had previously applied for this parliamentary seat in 1929. In the years that followed, he was re-elected several times, but ultimately lost his seat to Labor candidate James Harrison in the 1945 general election - which ended with a landslide victory for the Labor Party that cost many Conservative MPs their seats . An attempt to recapture his seat in the 1950 election also ended in a loss to Harrison.

As a prominent Jew in public life in Great Britain, Gluckstein, like the other 15 Jewish MPs who sat in the British Parliament during the Second World War, was targeted by the National Socialist police after the outbreak of war: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him - like the other "Jewish" members of the House of Commons - on the special wanted list GB , a directory of persons who should be located and arrested with special priority by the occupying forces following special SS units in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht .

During the war and in the early post-war years, Gluckstein was a noted exponent of the anti-Zionist wing of the Jewish community in Britain.

1952 Gluckstein was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of the County of London. In 1968 he was elected chairman of the Greater London Council, the council of Greater London. He was also a member of the Council for the Royal Albert Hall . On June 30, 1953, on the occasion of Elizabeth II's accession to the throne , he was promoted to Knight Bachelor . On June 14, 1969, he was inducted into the Order of the British Empire as the Knight Grand Cross .

With a height of 2.02 meters, Gluckstein was considered the tallest MP in the history of the British House of Commons until Daniel Kawczynski moved into the House of Commons in 2005.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry on Gluckstein on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum) .
  2. ^ Rory Miller: Divided Against Zion: Anti-Zionist Opposition to the Creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, 1945-1948 . Routledge, 2013, ISBN 978-1-135-26789-6 ( google.de [accessed September 30, 2018]).
  3. ^ Geoffrey Alderman: Modern British Jewry . Clarendon Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-19-820759-7 ( google.de [accessed September 30, 2018]).
  4. ↑ a b Knights and Dames: FOX-GZ at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
personal data
SURNAME Gluckstein, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gluckstein, Sir Louis Halle (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British lawyer and politician (Conservative Party)
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamstead
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1979